Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/117

The Egyptian Orders. 95 Like the steles they are self-contained and independent of their surroundings.^ We see, then, that as time went on the Egyptian architects have transformed the old, plain, rectangular pier — by giving it capital and base, by adorning it with painted and sculptured decorations — until it became fit to take its place in the most ornate architectural composition. We have yet to follow the same constructive member in a further series of modifications which ended by making it indistinguishable from the column proper. In order thoroughly to understand all these intermediary types we must return to the rock-cut tombs, in which the ceilings were upheld by piers left standing when the excavation was made. The desire to get as much light as possible past these piers led to their angles being struck off in the first instance, and thus a quadrangular pier became an octagonal prism (Fig. 72), and was connected with the soil by a large, flat, disk-shaped base. By repeating the same process and cutting off the eight angles of this prism, a sixteen-sided shaft was obtained, examples of which are to be found at Beni- Hassan in the same tomb as the octagonal column (Fig. y;^). " The practical difficulty of cutting these sixteen faces with precision and of equalizing the angles at which they met each other, added to the natural desire to make the division into sixteen planes clearly visible, and to give more animation to the play of light and shade, inspired the Egyptian architects with the happy notion of transforming the obtuse angles into salient ridges by hollowing out the spaces between them." - The highest part, however, of these pillars remained quadrangular, thus preserving a reminiscence of the original type, and supplying a connecting ^ At Dayr-el-Bahari there are some pillars of the same shape but engaged in the wall. They support groups — carved in stone and painted — comprising a hawk, a ilture, cynocephali, and so on. They are in the passage which leads to the north-western s/>e(?s. Their total height, inclusive of the animals which surmount them, is nearly 18 feet, of which the groups make up nearly a third. The lower part is ornamented by mouldings in the shape of panels. These pilasters should be more carefully studied and reproduced if they still exist : the sketches from which we have described them were made some fifteen years ago. In that monument of Egyptian sculpture which is, perhaps, the oldest of all, namely, the bas-relief engraved by Seneferu upon the rocks of Wadi-Maghara, a hawk crowned with the pschent stands before the conqueror upon a quadrangular pier which has panels marked upon it in the same fashion as at Dayr-el-Bahari. ^ Ebers, ^gypten, vol. ii., p. 184.